


Floriography

by Pax



Category: Coffee Prince, Korean Drama
Genre: Body Paint, Character of Color, F/F, Flowers, Impulse Control, No Sex, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character, Painting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-07
Updated: 2011-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-22 07:57:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/235860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pax/pseuds/Pax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eun Chan, would you allow me to paint you?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Floriography

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Porn Battle prompt "Coffee Prince, Yoo Joo/Eun Chan, paint." Thanks to my main Korean, J, for the tidbit about the carnations.

When Eun Chan walks into the studio, Yoo Joo's sitting on the loft balcony, enjoying the late afternoon light. In art school, one of her professors said that in English, this time was called “the golden hour,” when the sun slanting low to the horizon was kind to everyone and everything it touched, making them glow from within.

It is, she reflects, the perfect time for this.

Eun Chan wanders around below her, touching everything, not looking at her. She's a ball of compressed energy, about to vibrate out of her skin. She rearranges her anatomical model until it's doing a handstand, picks up a paintbrush and starts twirling it like a baton, flops down onto the couch with a sigh. It's not until she starts running the brush over her lips, across her cheeks, down into the hollow at the base of her throat that Yoo Joo gives in and descends to greet her.

“Eun Chan,” she says, hugging her lightly. She smells like strawberry shampoo, new-mown grass, and sweat.

“Hey, unni.” Eun Chan usually gives big, enthusiastic hugs, squeezing like she's trying to get the last drop of affection out of people, but today she just kind of stands there, patting Yoo Joo's back awkwardly. Yoo Joo pulls back, looking at her carefully.

“Are you ready?” she asks, brushing a bit of short hair out of the way.

Eun Chan takes a big, gulping breath, then smiles weakly. “Yes, I think so.”

Yoo Joo gestures towards the middle of the room, where she's laid down a fresh, clean drop-cloth on the floor, next to a table with her paints and brushes. “If you could please stand here.”

Eun Chan steps onto the drop-cloth, turns her back to Yoo Joo, and starts to strip. Jacket, shirt, shorts, bra, panties, socks – she tosses them all to the side, aiming vaguely in the direction of a chair. Yoo Joo busies herself folding the clothes neatly on the chair, then pours herself her glass of red wine, giving Eun Chan a moment to collect herself.

When she turns towards the center of the room, Eun Chan is standing, naked, in the light of the golden hour. Her hands twitch towards her private parts, making to cover up the thatch of black hair, then settle low on her hips, framing them. Eun Chan meets Yoo Joo's eyes, a mixture of trust and defiance playing across her face.

“Hold still,” Yoo Joo says, and picks up a brush.

The language of flowers is subtle, she's been told, but Yoo Joo's never studied it much. She prefers to make it up as she goes, assigning personalities to her flowers as she sees fit. Peonies are oversized, almost brash at first glance, but complex. Hundreds of petals align in complex patterns to form the overall effect, and each one bruises so easily. When they wilt, they do it with their whole body, but when they are strong, they are beautiful.

Yoo Joo drops to her knees and starts with peonies, on Eun Chan's outer thigh. Her skin there is tight, stretched across the muscle built up from taekwondo, and easy to work on. Eun Chan twitches while Yoo Joo paints the base of the flower in big globs of luminous white, then goes over it with delicate, blush pink, but it's not until she begins to go back over the pink with her smallest brush, adding highlights, that a twitch causes her brush to miss a stroke.

She stands up, cups Eun Chan's chin in her hand. “Hold still, or I will make you.” She tries, as in all things, to be quiet but firm. Eun Chan swallows, nods once; There's a smudge of pink paint on her jaw, near her ear.

Yoo Joo believes in using her mistakes; it's that, or drown in them. Eun Chan's back becomes a cherry tree in full bloom, dark wood rising from the base of her spine, twisted and gnarled with effort, with carrying too heavy a load too young. One branch reaches up the left side of her neck to her mistake, embracing it into the pattern. She trails ivy down her arms, lively and winding and green, clinging tight to her knobby elbows with strangling love. Eun Chan giggles at each three-pointed leaf, but stays absolutely still. Dandelions grow up her calves, yellow and hearty, rooting her to the ground, giving her the indestructible strength of stubbornness.

Under Yoo Joo's brush, three red carnations bloom on the right side of her neck, just under her hairline. Yoo Joo takes her time with these, smoothing the petals, using first one red, then another, layering the paint into hearty, strong flowers, then demolishing the middle one, wilting it with browns and blacks and savage, biting strokes. With each stroke, Eun Chan's breath catches in her chest, not with giggles, but with something smaller, and more exquisitely fragile.

So many strokes, for so many injuries.

Yoo Joo steps around to Eun Chan's front for the first time since she scolded her for fidgeting. So far, she's been careful, but before she goes further, she needs more than the silence and giggles of a girl. She raises her eyes to look Eun Chan in the face.

In the light of the golden hour, she sees a woman, shining like the sun.

Yoo Joo moves on.

Her small breasts Yoo Joo first makes into the sunflowers of the Coffee Prince, continuing the brown pebbly texture of her areolae into the fat, furry centers, feathering the yellow petals out to where the slight curve meets her bony ribs, but the color isn't quite right. The yellow clashes with her golden skin, which is beginning to flush gloriously red.

“Unni,” says Eun Chan, her voice cracking. “Are you – are you close to being done?” She's shifting from foot to foot, like her legs are tired, but her eyes are wide, pupils blown.

She's beautiful like this. Not just charming, or vivacious, or any of the words Yoo Joo's used to try to capture the essence of Eun Chan in conversation with others, but genuinely beautiful.

Yoo Joo takes a moment to smile at Eun Chan, her eyes crinkling. “No, not quite.” Then she gets back to work.

The expressiveness of the large flowers works, but the color doesn't. Eun Chan needs something uniquely Eun Chan. So Yoo Joo experiments. She reverses her steps on the left breast, this time in reds, going over the petals first, then moving inwards, taking her time. The work gets harder as Eun Chan breathes faster, quick, shallow breaths that make Yoo Joo's brush skip and catch on Eun Chan's nipples, spattering the paint. Yoo Joo pauses, thinking about wiping it off, but decides she likes the effect. The dark brownish red looks like wet earth, making the flowers seem alive, vibrant, fresh from the garden. The newly-painted gerbera daisy has a cheerful look to it; Yoo Joo enhances that, takes a big, soft brush and adds a fat green stalk below it like a smile, trailing down, down, around her small navel, down into the thatch of hair to stop just a little too high.

Now Eun Chan squirms, practically writhes, wriggling back and forth, trying to get some friction without touching herself. Fascinating – she's normally so immodest, so eager. The restraint is becoming on her – she's resisting because Yoo Joo _asked_ , because she _wanted_ her to. Her inner thighs are wet, lacquered to a high gloss in stark contrast to the rest of the matte canvas of skin. As Yoo Joo watches, a fat drop rolls down her leg, cutting a line through the delicate stalk of the peonies where it curves around to her knee.

"Unni," Eun Chan says, breathless, almost whimpering, covered in a riot of color and form. "Can I —"

"Not now, darling," Yoo Joo says, smiling, pleased with her work. "You'll smear the paint."

**Author's Note:**

> Most of the floriography in here is cobbled together or made up, but there are two pieces I'd like to discuss further, because they're rooted in Korean culture and because I am an enormous nerd. The carnations refer to an old divination method, in which a young girl's hair is braided with three carnations. If the top carnation wilts first, the girl's last years will be difficult; if the middle carnation wilts, the girl will have a troubled early life; if the bottom carnations wilts, the girl's entire life will be full of hardship. Cherry trees are associated with strength in adversity; the woman who taught me taekwondo liked to say that both cherry trees and female martial artists bloom when the conditions are harshest.


End file.
